Scott Willis and
Tricia Kerney-Willis
Tricia Kerney-Willis, M.U.P. ’98 & M.S. ’98, and Scott Willis, M.U.P. ’98 & M.S. ’97, met as students in the UB planning program and married in 2000. They have fast-track careers in banking in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area and share a commitment to closing the housing gap in their region. National home ownership statistics are striking: 50 percent of minority families own homes, compared to 70 percent of white families.
From 1999 to 2002, Kerney-Willis was working in commercial real estate development. She drew on her planner’s knowledge of the built environment and her own research showing that policy and planning strategies can remake inner-city wastelands into communities with a sound future. She frequently attended residential closings for minority individuals when a sale would pay off a development loan. “It was amazing,” she recalls. “People thanked me with tears in their eyes, even though I wasn’t their loan agent.”
Her experiences in development convinced her that a move into residential real estate would allow her to make a more direct impact on minority communities. In 2002, she was hired by Bank of America, one of the first banks nationwide to create a department focused on community development. Now an assistant vice president and mortgage account executive with a region encompassing Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland, she has a monthly goal of $1 million in mortgage production. She looks back with amazement on her rapid rise in this fast and lucrative market. But what really pays her back, she says, is building minority home ownership in southeast Washington and Anacostia, both in the District of Columbia.
Kerney-Willis works with churches, community organizations and nonprofits to run workshops for first-time buyers. She offers basic information and changes a mind-set created by years or even generations of renting. “Minority buyers often don’t understand that home ownership can allow them to create the wealth to send a child to college or enjoy a better retirement,” she explains.
Scott Willis also sees home ownership as a minority family’s key to stability. “It’s about controlling your own destiny,” he says. As vice president of emerging markets for the Mid-Atlantic region for First Horizon Home Loans, Willis is setting up the framework in which minority communities can tap financial resources. A planning path led to this position.
When the Department of Housing and Urban Development designated Baltimore an Empowerment Zone, Willis served as the business development program manager for the Empower Baltimore Management Corporation from 1999 to 2001, managing 20 percent of HUD’s $100 million devoted to this project. This project contributed to Baltimore being named the country’s most successful Empowerment Zone. “Planning is just planning without financial resources,” he says, explaining that he sees banking as a way to use his planning skills and serve minority communities by putting those resources into their hands.
His most wide-reaching opportunity came in 2004, when First Horizon began an emerging markets initiative and brought Willis in to build networks to deliver information and financial services to minority communities in Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Prince Georges and Montgomery Counties, Maryland. The Willises see their UB years as a shared experience that blended their personal relationship with their professional identities. His thesis advisor, Ernest Sternberg, professor of planning, supported his research on workforce development and “embodies everything I think a planner should be. He talked about the usefulness of planning techniques in all fields and aspects of life.” Tricia Kerney-Willis also credits Sternberg’s role in creating a nurturing environment for students and encouraging her own research. Both agree that their planning background gave them an exposure to the built environment and a comprehensive view of processes that make them distinct among the M.B.A.s who dominate their field.
It also provided the basis for all they now share. They work for competing banks, but neither sees this as a problem. Scott Willis believes they have a shared respect. “We have watched each other grow. We play and compete as equals.” The couple has just built their first home and they talk about starting their own business someday, combining their complementary skills and commitment to building home ownership.
Originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of UB Today as part of the article Creating Innovative Environments: Inside and Out by Tacey A. Roslowski, Ph.D. '91.
